


All We Know of Heaven

by Balder12



Category: Greek and Roman Mythology
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-17
Updated: 2012-12-17
Packaged: 2017-11-21 09:53:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,985
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/596360
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Balder12/pseuds/Balder12
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ganymede could've lived happily on Olympus forever.  If not for <i>her</i>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All We Know of Heaven

**Author's Note:**

  * For [olorime](https://archiveofourown.org/users/olorime/gifts).



> Many thanks to my beta, Galfridian, for their time and energy.

The eagle plucked Ganymede from among his ragged flock of sheep and bore him away into the blessed realm beyond the sky. The last sound he heard from the mortal world was his dog, barking at Zeus as if he were a wolf come to steal the lambs. Later, Ganymede remembered nothing of those early days on Olympus except for the passion that descended upon him with the sudden and irresistible intensity of a rainstorm in summer, the way his hair rose up and crackled, the rapture that tore him open like talons.

It passed. Zeus loved no one for long. He drained Ganymede in a single gulp, the way he drained his goblet of nectar, and tossed him aside. When Ganymede stepped forward to serve the table now, he felt Hera's eyes on him, vicious and pleased. Zeus always returned to her in the end.

Ganymede might have fallen through the cracks in the great serving hall and been forgotten, as a thousand less fortunate boys and girls had been before him, had Apollo not taken notice. As a rule, the gods had no interest in each other's leavings. They preferred virgins. Maidens locked in towers or raised in pastoral isolation were better yet, unviolated by even the eyes of men. But Apollo had only recently been scorned by the nymph Daphne, and his wounded pride drew him to a lover who would be grateful for his attention, one who would never say no. Or so Ganymede imagined. He was in no position to ask.

Ganymede and Apollo spent their days in the eternal spring of the Olympian gardens. When they grew tired of archery and the discus, Apollo would bring out his lyre and play sweet, impossible music. Sometimes, Ganymede would accompany him, singing the old songs that his mother sang after dinner when his family gathered around the hearth. Apollo said that he had a good voice, though Ganymede seldom finished more than a verse or two before the god pulled him down among the wildflowers. Liquid gold flooded through his limbs then, hot and bright, and his heart echoed in his ears, beating in the meter of poetry as yet unwritten.

******************************************************************************

It was dusk when Apollo left Ganymede in the garden that day, or what passed for dusk on Olympus. The breeze cooled, and the light shifted to a bluer hue. True darkness never fell. Even at midnight, the sky was plum colored, brightened by a golden moon that neither waxed nor waned and glittering with stars of every color. Ganymede heard the faint rattle of armor and saw Athena approaching on the garden path, her owl perched on her shoulder. He thought nothing of it. He had seen her many times in the great hall, and she had never said more to him than, "Fetch another glass." None of them did. He was one beautiful object in a palace full of them. He was beneath their notice.

He stepped aside to let her pass, but instead she stopped in front of him. Her gray eyes fixed on his face, cold and assessing. She and her owl both tilted their heads in the same direction as they studied him.

"You have been with us long," she said at last.

"Yes, my lady," he said, although he did not know. He had been nineteen when he arrived. He was nineteen now. Olympus had no seasons, no means of marking mortal time.

"Are you happy here?" she asked.

He suspected that it was a trick question. Hera, who was spiteful even in victory, had sent Athena to lay some clever trap. Still, it would never do not to answer her. "Yes, my lady, I'm happy." How could he not be? He dwelt in perfect luxury, eternally free of pain, and fear, and death.

She frowned, disappointed by his answer. "Then you desire nothing else? Your ambition rises no higher than this?" The sweep of her arm took in the garden, and the palace, and the moon rising behind him.

Ganymede thought then that he understood her sudden interest in him. His heart sank. Humans pursued by two gods were inevitably destroyed, ripped apart like a carcass the hounds fought over. And yet it would be worse to tell her no. A jilted goddess was an implacable enemy. He kissed her. She tasted like honey and cool stone.

She shoved him away, and the owl flapped its wings, startled. He cringed and waited for the pain that must surely follow upon his mistake. Men had been killed for less. No harm came to him, though, and when he finally looked up she was smiling, the lines around her eyes crinkled in amusement.

"You misunderstand me, boy," she said. The owl considered her expression and settled down, primly preening its feathers. "I'm called 'The Virgin' for a reason. I have no interest in the pleasures of the flesh. I only wondered whether you were angry that my father stole you from your destiny."

Ganymede laughed. "I was a shepherd. I had no destiny."

"All men have a destiny," she said and turned away, suddenly finished with the conversation. He watched her until a bend in the path hid her from view.

***********************************************************************************

Ganymede told himself he would think no more about his strange conversation with Athena, but his mind returned to it again and again in the days that followed. It had been a long time since anyone had spoken to him as if he were a man, and not some pet or plaything. Under the weight of that realization, the flowers in the garden looked paler, and the wine tasted sour. In the end, Ganymede could keep silent no longer and asked Apollo whether Athena was right that all men had a destiny, even shepherds.

"No man has yet come to Delphi who had no future to foretell," Apollo said. But it was obvious that the matter held no interest for him, and Ganymede was soon rolling around on the grass, his questions forgotten.

That evening, when Apollo left, Ganymede lingered on the garden path. He told himself that he was not waiting for her. She came, though, just as the sky deepened from blue to violet, and the shadows cast by the olive trees turned black.

"Apollo said that you were right," Ganymede told her. "All men have a destiny."

Athena's jaw set. "It is of no account to me what my brother believes. What I know, I know." Ganymede realized that he had been foolish to measure one god by another. Their familial resentments were ancient and vast.

"Never mind," she said, with a curt nod of her head that her owl imitated. "You haven't answered my question. Are you not angry that you were stolen from your destiny?"

"I don't know," he said. It had never occurred to him that he had a right to be angry.

Her brows knit, as if she were looking at the map of a battlefield, uncertain where her to deploy her soldiers. "You must miss your parents," she said.

"Yes, my lady, sometimes." Ganymede hadn't thought of them since the eagle carried him away. He thought of them now, though, and wondered how they fared without a strong young man to tend the sheep and repair the house. He wondered if they still lived.

"And your sister," Athena said. "She was heavy with child when you saw her last."

"Did she deliver safely?" Ganymede hadn't feared for his sister a moment earlier, but now it was as if a cloud had lifted from his mind. He longed to see her.

"Do you care?" Athena said. She and the owl both stared him down.

"She's my sister. Of course I care." It was the first time that he'd spoken sharply to a god. Athena looked pleased.

"Then go see her yourself," she said. She did not spare him a backward glance as she walked on, but the owl turned its head around, watching him with inhuman curiosity until it was out of sight.

******************************************************************************

After that, Ganymede dreamed of home every night: the smell of fresh bread baking, the whistle that his father had taught him to call in the sheepdogs, his sister's laughter. He remembered how, as a boy, he had lined up rows of pebbles in the dirt, and imagined that they were soldiers he was commanding in battle. He remembered the bitter cold and pitch black of pre-dawn when he led the sheep out to graze. The cool purple light that passed for night on Olympus seemed cloying in comparison. None of heaven's pleasures pleased him any longer. Even Apollo's laurel-scented embrace only served to remind him of the sweetheart he'd left behind. Her skin had tasted like salt and sweat and hay, that time they'd made love in the barn. He missed her.

Every evening he waited for Athena on the garden path, but it was many weeks before she returned. Her owl was gone.

"I was content to forget the thread of my life," he said. "Why did you poison my happiness?" No mortal should speak so insolently to a god, but he found that he no longer cared. He had been bold once, in the time before, fearless in the face of wolves and robbers. He found that young man still dwelt within him.

"With much wisdom comes much sorrow," Athena said mildly. "Or so some men would have it. Regardless, you will be pleased to learn that I'll trouble you no longer. Odysseus, whom I have loved, is old, and he abandons his kingdom and aged wife to spend his last days at sea. He rallies those of his men that remain to sail west, beyond the sunset, to seek lands unknown, even to the gods. I mean to walk in the wake of his ship until he dies." She gestured to the place on her shoulder where the owl had perched. "My heart flies before me."

She turned to leave, but then half-turned back again, as if it were an afterthought. "The gates to Earth will be open tonight, in the olive grove behind the palace. You may use them, or not, just as you like. If you stay, you will not see me again. If you go, I may visit you, though not for many years."

"On earth, I may not live for many years. I could die of a fever in six weeks," Ganymede said. It wasn't Athena that he sought to convince.

"You could," she said, indifferent. "It's beyond my knowledge. My brother is the one with the gift of prophecy." She turned away again.

He couldn't let her go like that. He needed her to understand. "If I stay here, I'll live forever."

She didn't turn around. "This is not living." This time she didn't even make the pretense of walking away as mortals do. She was simply gone.

******************************************************************************************

The gate was not a gate to human eyes. It was a shift in the air, rippling like water. It flowed over Ganymede, and he stood in the liminal space of the threshold. Behind him, the plum colored sky and fragrant air of Olympus beckoned him back. Before him, the aching cold and impenetrable blackness of true night waited. Only a single step was necessary to cross the line beyond which Olympus ceased to be a celestial realm, and became merely a mountain in Greece. Ganymede thought of his mother and father, and of how they must long ago have given him up for dead. He thought of his sister, and of the child that he'd never seen. He thought of the girl he'd loved, and the dreams he'd dreamt. He thought of the all-consuming fire of a god's love. He thought of war, and famine, and disease, and the sharp teeth of the wolves.

Then he thought of _her_ , and he stepped out into the dark.


End file.
